I think, in fast and furious and physically difficult birding conditions (which often obtain when seeking the most or "best" birds), the utility of superb binoculars is far above lesser bins that otherwise would suffice. Consequently, as a dedicated birder, I could never endorse the notion that a great scope is more important than great bins. That said, I also don't endorse the idea of having great bins and a crummy scope. Get the great bins because they are the most important optical tool for most birding. Spend on the great scope because if properly cared for, it will last and will not be made obsolete. Improvements in birding scopes are hard to obtain at this point, and given that atmospheric effects are often the limitation on what can be seen, further improvements will not be of much practical significance.
These days, I am using my Kowa 884 with 25-60x and 1.6x (so, effectively 40-96x) very heavily for fieldwork (digiscoping basking turtles). It performs flawlessly. Really, I have no complaints. Still, I don't feel I'm taking a step down in utility or fine optical performance when I use my ancient Nikon 78ED with 30x wide for birding. The 25-75x zoom on that scope is also super sharp and works beautifully when needed, but if using a zoom on a routine basis I prefer the Kowa zoom and scope because of its better eye relief for glasses, wider FOV, and larger aperture. If I weren't doing the turtle work, I'd probably have had no trouble continuing to resist purchasing the Kowa 884 or any another modern scope. Since I bought the 78ED in ~1996, I've had plenty of opportunity to compare it to everything else, and I could have purchased several scopes to replace it since then, but I just couldn't see (literally) much if any benefit, so the only scopes that have inspired a purchase were the 50ED (for travel; body-only new for $325) and an 82ED that I couldn't resist (as a back-up/lender) new with 25-75x mark II zoom for under $900. Scopes are cheap because one can buy one or two and then be done. I haven't found the same to be true for bins, but maybe that's because I got into birding in the mid 1980s, when bins were not optimized for birding. It's been a long time getting here, but now that we have close-focusing, compact, long eye-relief, reasonably wide-field, waterproof, optically stunning bins, maybe I could imagine that I could feel the same way about bins as I do scopes. If I were starting today, and got the Swarovski 8.5x42 EL SV and Zeiss 8x25 Victory Pocket, I might be satisfied with my bins indefinitely (which is to say until Swarovski were to give the EL variable-ratio focus. C'mon Swarovski!)
--AP
) is more important than using an alpha binocular for most purposes. There are many pretty good binoculars in the mid-price range nowadays, but only very few really good scopes. Most of the bargain scopes just don't cut it.
